America's "woefully underprepared" students can become tomorrow's leaders

America, as a nation and an education system, must stop mollycoddling today’s students and, instead, demand higher academic expectations if they are to evolve into tomorrow’s successful global leaders. Otherwise, they risk perpetuating the overwhelming reality that their skills sets are “woefully underprepared” for workplace translation, says former U.S. Secretary of Education and White House Domestic Policy Advisor Margaret Spellings.

“We need to raise expectations for students because we have let them get away with too little for too long, at all levels,” says Spelling, who served under the George W. Bush Administration.

“Most American kids in high school think they are going to go to college, get out and be successful when the hard fact is they are woefully underprepared to do that,” says Spellings, now the president and CEO of Margaret Spellings & Company, a public policy and strategic consultant firm. “Their goals, dreams and aspirations do not align, at all, with what the reality is in this world. So we need our educators, employers and community leaders to be clearer on what [skills are] required” to be competitive in a global, knowledge-based society.

The collaborative study “Are They Really Ready To Work?" supports Spellings’ perspective. This study’s 400 surveyed employers report that a shockingly high rate of workplace entrants with high school diplomas and/or undergraduate college degrees possess steep deficiencies in basic skills, such as reading and writing, as well as in applied skills, including critical thinking and professionalism. As a result, nearly three quarters, or 73%, of responding CEOs report they encounter difficulty recruiting qualified job candidates to maintain a high level of global competitiveness for their companies.

Spellings cannot hide the disappointed tone in her voice.

“If you can’t read and cipher today at not just a basic level, but at a highly competent level, you are not set up to participate in the global knowledge economy and I think we’ve seen that play out over and over again,” she says. “On any given day in America, millions of jobs go unfulfilled because employers cannot find skilled workers to fill them.”

Spelling emphasizes that her assessment is not meant to denigrate the quality academic foundation laid by those dedicated educators valiantly torching the way thus far. Rather, Spellings’ entreaty for better student outcomes derives from her longtime belief —compounded by such alarming studies about our future workforce — that America needs more “education entrepreneurs” willing to put innovation to task. In other words, she explains, education entrepreneurs don’t only think outside of the public education box, but they help blur those boundaries between traditional teaching methods and external private business principals.

America’s need for educational entrepreneurs

“Education is a universally shared value, and we, Americans, know and believe that the future of our country and us, as individuals, is rooted in it,” says Spellings. “Better using data; better using time; better using people for their expertise: That’s what is at issue in this country and is something the private (education and business) sectors know a lot about and can bring to bear” for today’s students.

Therefore, Spellings says it behooves educational institutions, especially higher education, to adopt a self-motivated “reform agenda” that partners educators with external, capital-driven people capable of bringing quality instruction to the table. For example, higher education might wish to offer online or “a la carte” courses that, in turn, incorporate experts, like NASA scientists, to facilitate student learning on a weekly or semester basis. It comes down to utilizing the best business methods to help students learn for a lifetime, not just for a course, she notes.

“People who have a prominent motivation in capital bring some things to the table that we in [higher] education need,” says Spellings, who helped form the Commission on the Future of High Education in 2005. “In fact, University of Phoenix invented a lot of this kind of innovation that is just now starting to take hold within the traditional, or non-profit, sector. Left to its own devices, such innovation would not happen [within public education] except for people like [those found at] University of Phoenix.”

Yet higher education can still take additional steps to further groom tomorrow’s workforce. Spellings specifically envisions higher education programs that deliberately harmonize knowledge about pedagogy with these business principals so that its students can compete with other nations, both intellectually and practically.

“I’d love to see programs that offer a joint MBA taught between a college of education and a business school, for example, or even [among] a math department, business school and college of education. Those kinds of things would be interesting ways to cultivate and groom this next generation of entrepreneurs,” she says.

Demand more and you shall receive more

Yet the pathway to global leadership begins with educators demanding more from students, starting at grade level, says Spellings. This helps to fortify their educational foundation from the ground level upward so that college faculty can focus on global grooming for new college entrants rather than teach the basic skills remediation courses that Spellings notes are becoming too frequent of an occurrence in America.

“No Child Left Behind was quite a modest goal of getting kids on grade level within 12 years and now there is all this hue and cry about how it’s a failure, so on and so forth,” says Spellings, a principal author of No Child Left Behind. “Yet if I asked your mother when she would want her [child] on grade level, she would say: ‘right now!’”

If educators want to see significant changes at the higher education level, Spellings adds, then “we need to really be doing more than just talk about the connection between the K-12 system and the post secondary system … [and be] much more action-oriented as far as what is expected.”

This means not “watering down” academic standards or discipline areas, including engineering, mathematics, English, language and the arts, she says. Global leaders, she points out, not only “must” know subject content well, but should also be expected to possess exceptional problem solving, teamwork, communication and other so-called soft skills that they can later adapt to the workplace.

Students, she stresses, “need to be committed to the cause. They need to have an attitude about work that apparently people are not just born with so we need to teach it.”

To do help students do this, Spellings says education institutions must offer a more consumer-friendly education that allows students to understand and assess the importance of the education process so they can maximize its potential. This includes transparency, including discussing the value of the programs, the necessary time investment, and the price the education is going to cost them, she notes.

“We, as educators, need to hold ourselves to some accountability,” she says.

Because if educators can help students understand education’s benefit in all its manifestations, Spelling says, then perhaps these students will learn that if they don’t invest in education now they should not expect businesses to invest in them later on.